How to wreck your employer’s reputation in one easy step

Remember how frustrating it was, the last time you looked for a job, to carefully craft a resume and cover letter for each opening that seemed like a good fit, then send them along to prospective employers and hear … nothing? Maybe you even got past the phone-screening stage to an in-person interview, or more than one, that you thought went really well. And then you waited. And waited.

And heard … crickets.

Maddening, wasn’t it? For one thing, being left to twist in the wind makes it hard to know how to respond to other offers. (What if you accept a position at your second-choice XYZ Corp., and then get the nod from Ostrich Enterprises, where you really want to work?) Beyond that, letting someone know whether they got the job or not is just common courtesy, isn’t it?

Courtesy, yes, but common? Not so much. Almost all (92.5%) job candidates want companies to let them know where they stand, even if they didn’t get the job, says LinkedIn’s Talent Trends 2015 survey of more than 20,000 professionals in 29 countries. Yet only about one in three (34%) ever hear back one way or the other.

That’s bad for business in a few different ways. “Everyone you communicate with, but then don’t hire, is not only someone you might want to hire in the future, but also a potential customer,” notes Brendan Browne, LinkedIn’s global vice president of talent acquisition. “And they talk to their friends about their experience with you. Do you really want to treat them badly?”

To illustrate his point, Browne offers this bit of math: The average big company conducts about 15,000 interviews of external candidates per year and, of those, hires 5,000 or so. Since LinkedIn’s research suggests that at least one-third of the 10,000 people you decided not to hire are offended because they never heard back from you, “the average company decreases the size of its future talent pool by 3,000 every year,” Browne says. “And that doesn’t count the damage to your employment brand from those people telling their friends — in person and, even worse, on social media — how inconsiderate you were.”

The simple fix: End the radio silence. Browne estimates that LinkedIn turns down about 20,000 job hopefuls annually, and he says each one gets either an email or a phone call saying yea or nay within 48 hours of a hiring manager’s decision. The company uses online net promoter scores to measure its reputation with recent candidates, says Browne, “and we want our score to be as high, or higher, among people we didn’t hire as among those we did.”

Hiring managers, who are usually already overloaded, may fear that getting back to every interviewee will take up inordinate amounts of time but, notes Browne, “it doesn’t need to be a long conversation. People just want to know yes or no.”

True. Just as an experiment, try this: Write a brief, general email, similar to an old-fashioned form letter, thanking the candidate for his or her time and stating that, while you’ve filled the job in question, you’d appreciate the chance to keep in touch in case similar opportunities come along later.

Then send this to each person you’ve interviewed lately, tweaked slightly to include his or her name and maybe another detail or two. With practice, you can get this down to about 10 seconds per email. Let’s say you’ve interviewed 14 people. That’s 140 seconds to make sure your employment brand, not to mention your company’s good name, keeps on shining. Hard to think of a better use for less than three minutes.

These are the 10 worst jobs of 2015

Bad news for newspaper reporters: Your job has been named the worst in the U.S. for 2015, according to rankings released by job search site CareerCast.com. Two other media positions are also high on the list, along with professions that are physically taxing.

The jobs were ranked based on the following attributes, with much of the data coming from the Bureau of Labor Statistics: “income, outlook, environmental factors, stress and physical demands.”

And the best gig for 2015? That would be an actuary, the people who specialize in financial risk.

Real talk: Here’s what 22-year-olds need to know about their first job

Maybe it’s because we’re taught to find an older mentor. Or maybe it’s because people who are gray around the temples simply look wiser. Whatever the reason, when you’re fresh out of college, it’s tempting to seek career advice from the most accomplished people in the field you’re hoping to break into.

But in reality, those execs chalked up most of their accomplishments in an entirely different economic, technological and professional landscape. So Fortune talked to more recent college graduates—millennials who entered the workforce in the years after the economic crash and the invention of Twitter—about what they wish they’d known about getting a toehold in their career when they were 22.

Before you accept an internship, especially an unpaid internship, ask the employer this one question.

“Have you ever hired an intern?”

Internships have become a necessary inconvenience on the path to full-time, paid employment—even though they can sometimes seem more like a cruel prank to get recent graduates to fetch coffee and make copies for free.

Occasionally an unpaid internship turns into a solid job, but often it doesn’t. Before you gratefully accept someone’s offer to work for them for free, ask about the company’s track record of hiring from their intern pool, and weigh their answer before you accept. If they’ve only ever hired one intern, but have 60 working for them at any given time, it might be best to walk away.

“Sometimes it is worth it to wait and really vet these organizations. Expect better,” says Justine Dowden, who graduated in 2010 and has had six different internships or jobs since; she’s now pursuing a master’s in public health. “Try to work for a place that wants you to really grow from the experience of working for them, not just use you as expendable cheap labor. That will connect you to people. You really can’t wait around forever, but you can wait around for an internship that’s not just tweeting.”

Sometimes bigger—and more established—is better.

A creative startup with only five employees or a scrappy nonprofit looks cool from the outside—and it’s easy to think that you’ll be able to add a wide range of skills to your resume if everyone on staff is doing a little bit of everything. But it can also be maddening once you’ve been hired. Small upstarts often “don’t have the same HR structures as corporate places or law firms. All of the lines are blurred so it’s harder to know your position,” says Meg, a first-year associate at a law firm in Chicago, who watched many of her undergrad classmates unexpectedly struggle with the loose nature of their jobs at creative upstart companies. “Because the hierarchy wasn’t as clear, it was also harder for them to get mentors,” she adds. Beware of companies that lack a human resources department or won’t give you a concrete job description.

You don’t have to move to New York.

It might seem like all of your friends are moving to Bushwick, but take a wider view. There are good jobs everywhere. “Just try to look beyond NYC or Boston or SF,” says Dowden, who counts an internship in Amsterdam and a public-health job in Sacramento among her most valuable professional experiences.

Don’t wait for permission to put your ideas out into the world.

It’s never been easier to show employers that you have ideas worth listening to. Can’t get an informational interview with a company you’d love to work for? Sometimes it doesn’t hurt to publish your thoughts online about what the organization could be doing better.

“When I was a junior in college, I had some ideas I thought Google should work on, and I wrote this blog post,” says Ted Power, who graduated in 2007. “I mocked up this concept and put it out there, and got very lucky because someone at Google happened to see it, and said oh, you should apply for an internship here.” His internship turned into a full-time job at Google GOOG, which he later quit to instead work at a series of startups. Companies pay attention to what people say about them online, and if your tone is professional and your ideas are sound, you just might get lucky like Power did.

Meet as many people as you can. And keep in touch.

It might make you feel like a nag or a phony, but “all the bullshit you hear about networking is so true,” Meg says. When she first interviewed at her law firm, it went well. They told her they really liked her, but they wouldn’t be hiring any new associates that year—an all-too-common interview response in tough economic times. She kept in touch, calling them after she took the bar exam and again after she got the news that she’d passed. After her third or fourth call that ended with a polite decline, she got a call back from one of the partners, offering her a job. Meg’s pretty sure that never would have happened if she hadn’t gotten in touch with them after their initial “sorry, but we’re not hiring now.”

Also, don’t be afraid to work any personal connection you have—even if those connections aren’t people who are directly hiring right now. That fellow intern you befriended last summer? She might not be a hiring manager just yet, but she probably will know before outsiders do when her company is hiring. Don’t unfriend her on Facebook just because you’re annoyed she found a job right away and you didn’t. Stay in touch.

Put your Google-stalking skills to work.

Your talents are wasted on your ex. Instead, read up on the places you want to hire you and the people who work there. This is what LinkedIn LNKD is made for, but you can do better than that. Googling and combing social media can yield a surprising amount of information—so much that it’s almost like having a contact within the company. A lot of hiring managers are pretty public these days about what they look for in a new employee. Pay attention to what they’re saying.

It’s ok if you don’t know what your dream job is.

In fact, it might be better that way. The point of your first few jobs is just to try out different roles, responsibilities and different types of work environments.

“There’s a lot of pressure to find your dream job, or something that you absolutely love,” Power says. “That can almost be counterproductive because you have such high expectations. What’s more important is trying a bunch of stuff and figuring out what you like doing day to day. There are a lot of jobs that sound amazing, but the day to day is working in Excel or something.”

And if you do have a dream job, don’t write off an entry-level position just because it’s imperfect. After an internship at the White House, Meg landed a job at the Department of Justice, “which wasn’t my first choice,” she says. But in retrospect, it looks a lot better than the other political jobs she wished she’d gotten at the time. “I made $20,000 more at DOJ than you’d make at the White House,” she says. She also met a fantastic mentor at the Department of Justice, who convinced her to go to law school and ended up changing the course of her career.

Remember to have fun.

This is going to sound almost ridiculous, given that your first few jobs are likely to be less than ideal. But if you’re working super-long hours and finding yourself too busy to even see your friends, take a step back. You have plenty of time to work yourself to the bone later. “Young professional life is trying to figure out balance between trying to get ahead and enjoying your life,” Meg says.

Sure, you have loans to pay off. You want your next job to be a fantastic one. But you shouldn’t be more stressed than your boss who makes ten times as much. Your twenties are “the time you’re supposed to be going on disaster internet dates and going out and finding excellent hangover breakfast restaurants before work the next day,” Meg says. Make the most of them.

Companies add even more hoops to an already dizzying job hunt

Landing a job is tough, and it’s no secret that some companies are making it even harder.

One clear sign of this is the time companies are taking to fill jobs—25.6 working days, close to a 13-year high according to the Dice-DFH Vacancy Duration Measure.

Several factors have contributed to that lag time, like shrinking human resources departments, employers’ increasing pickiness about candidates’ credentials, and a growing interest in recruiting passive candidates via social media sites. More laborious pre-hire screenings are also to blame.

That’s right: to the already dizzying job hunting obstacle course, companies are adding even more hoops for job applicants to jump through.

Some of the hurdles are rather basic like background and credit checks. Others require prospective employees to take a test of some sort—computer engineers are asked to write code—or complete an even lengthier tryout. For instance, a company called Joor, which connects retailers and brands, hires would-be employees on a temporary basis and brings them on-board full-time if they perform well.

Then there are companies like Australian mobile app development startup Appster, whose in-person interviews serve as a test of mental endurance. Its interview process can last up to 22 hours. The extensive duration causes candidates to crack under the pressure, which can be a good or bad thing. “You start seeing glimmers of people’s personalities they can’t hide, things you would never be able to see in a traditional job interview,” Appster’s co-CEO Mark McDonald has said.

Technology companies are known for intense pre-hire screenings, but Peter Gundy, a managing director in the talent and rewards group at HR consulting firm Towers Watson, says he’s seeing the tendency crop up in other industries too.

What’s behind the trend?

Steven Davis, an economics professor at The University of Chicago Booth School of Business, says companies have a financial incentive to be more selective in hiring because it’s harder—legally—to get rid of employees than it’s been in the past and because the online trove of candidates’ personal and professional data complicates the selection process. Gundy says employers put job hunters through the wringer not just to find someone well suited for a specific job, but because they’re looking for that all-important “cultural fit” and trying to manage a prospective employee’s expectations for what the job will really be like. The ultimate goal is to cut down on turnover, the causes of which, Gundy says, “can often be traced back to things that could have been headed off in the interview process.”

Appster co-founders McDonald and Josiah Humphrey told Fortune that they instituted their rigorous interview process (which includes what the company calls a “one-day intensive” that lasts up to nine hours) about a year ago after determining that their more traditional hiring process had a 50% failure rate. They recalled one woman who sailed through the interview process, but during her first week, McDonald says, it was obvious that “she had no idea about technology and [technology is] a core competency of our business.”

While Appster’s new system is “very exhausting for the candidate,” McDonald says, the company discovered that the candidates who succeed do so because they’re comfortable talking ad nauseam about their careers—often because they’re well qualified and have nothing to hide about their past positions. “We’re really opening up [our] books to them too,” he says, which helps prospective hires determine if Appster is really where they want to work.

Building a cohesive culture is certainly driving more rigorous interviews, but companies’ bottom lines are also giving the trend a big push. That’s because replacing workers is expensive; Gundy pegs the cost of losing and replacing an employee at between 50% and 200% of an employee’s annual salary. There are indirect costs as well, in terms of lost productivity.

That’s why startups and smaller companies might be buying into this trend. “At a startup, there’s a higher risk of making a mis-hire,” says David Fullerton, vice president of engineering at Stack Exchange, a question and answer website for programmers that also posts programmer jobs. “At a bigger company, there are systems that deal with that; a few bad employees at a giant company is not going to sink you.”

Concerns about turnover, employee engagement, and creating a cohesive culture are nothing new. What’s changing is the way employers are addressing these issues.

In the past, Gundy says, companies would simply try to throw money at an employee retention problem by offering employees stock grants and bonuses to get them to stay. But now, “resources are shrinking,” he says. As health care costs increase and salary and bonus budgets diminish, employers are trying to reduce turnover and boost employee engagement from the get-go by implementing more discerning hiring processes.

And according to David Lewin, a professor at UCLA Anderson School of Management, when work sampling is included in pre-hire selection systems, companies are better able to predict a candidate’s future job performance. There’s no perfect employee-employer matchmaker, but getting a glimpse of a prospective hire’s work in real time is “the most valid employee selection method,” he says, more so than interviewing or biographical data that’s obtained from resumes. It’s no surprise, then, that the internship-to-full-time position pipeline is so popular and the temp-to-hire tryout method is gaining steam.

The rigorous pre-hire selection phenomenon is contributing to lower rates of “separation,” or when a worker leaves a job, Davis says. “The basic idea is that if you screen more intensively, you’re going to make fewer mistakes you’re going to make and you’ll get less separation early on,” he says.

All of this breeds mixed results within the economy at large. “There are positives if fewer people are losing their jobs in an unwanted matter. On the other hand, if you do lose your job in a market that doesn’t throw up many hiring opportunities, you’re likely to get stuck there for a long period of time.”

Why the holidays are a great time to step up (or start) a job hunt

With all the shopping, wrapping, and extra errands cluttering your calendar right now, looking for a new job has probably dropped to the bottom of your to-do list, at least until January.

“Most job seekers hit the pause button during the holidays,” notes Tony Beshara, president of Dallas headhunting firm Babich & Associates, who has been an executive recruiter for 41 years. “But this can be a great time to find a new job.”

For one thing, since fewer people are actively looking, you have less competition. Sometimes you can wow a prospective employer just by showing up. “I had one job candidate who dropped everything on Christmas Eve and drove to the Dallas-Fort Worth airport to meet with a hiring manager who happened to be passing through and had a two-hour layover,” says Beshara. “The interviewer was so impressed by the candidate’s willingness to sacrifice his time on the night before Christmas, he hired the guy on the spot.”

Even diehard road warriors would rather not risk getting snowed in, or otherwise stuck, at an airport far from home for the holidays. So, during the last two weeks of the year, most people in a position to hire you are sitting at their desks, Beshara says, “and they have lots of time to conduct interviews.”

Not only that, he adds, but “people are in a better mood at this time of year, especially if they’re happy with their annual bonus.” At the moment, that seems more likely than not. A survey from Korn/Ferry found that 36% of companies are planning to give higher bonuses to their executives than last year, more than twice the 15% that say bonuses will shrink.

If you’ve tried and failed to get an interview with a company where you’d like to work, try again. Plenty of employers who have been unusually slow to bring new people on board in the first three quarters of 2014 may now be up against a deadline. “Some companies know they need to hire for the first of the year, and hiring managers have been putting it off for months,” Beshara observes. “So they’re motivated to get the process rolling.”

We’ve all heard that office parties and other holiday festivities can be a great chance to chat with people who might know of job openings, but now and then these get-togethers go way beyond networking. Beshara had one employer as a client who invited a job seeker to the company’s afternoon Christmas bash, even though the candidate had not yet been hired. The manager then tipped quite a few glasses of holiday cheer and offered the candidate the job.

“Unfortunately, he didn’t remember this the next day,” Beshara says. “Luckily, in his inebriated state, he had walked the candidate to the HR office and told them to put the offer in writing.” Ho, ho, ho.

What IT pros should look for in their next job

Dear Annie: My mom sent me your article about why Millennials aren’t accepting job offers, because I am one of them. I just got a bachelor’s from a “big name” school, with a double major in engineering and computer science, and I’ve done two internships where I learned a lot about developing mobile apps. Before I even graduated, I got offers from every employer I applied to.

But so far, I haven’t accepted any, partly because I’m having second thoughts about the company offering the highest starting pay. I’ve spent a fair amount of time there, both in interviews and “shadowing” the CIO, but so far I haven’t met anyone outside the IT department. I really want to be involved in the business, and not get typecast as “just a tech person,” so the fact that the IT group seems kind of isolated from the rest of the company bothers me. But should it? And is it okay to ask about that? — Undecided

Dear Undecided: It’s absolutely okay to ask about that. In fact, you’d be making a mistake not to bring it up, along with a few other crucial questions. First, you might be interested to know that IT job site Dice.com reports employers plan to hire more entry-level techies in the next six months than at any time since 2011. But almost 40% of all new grads with job offers had not accepted any by the time they got their sheepskins, according to the National Association of Colleges and Employers, so you’re not the only one hesitating.

Moreover, you’re wise to look carefully at more than just pay. Dice.com’s new hiring survey suggests that, among IT people looking to change jobs, 61% are asking prospective employers for more money than six months ago. Nothing wrong with that, of course. But when online tech community Wisegate polled hundreds of senior IT managers and CIOs in April, two-thirds said they plan to change jobs within two years—and most are using criteria other than money to choose their next move.

One of those is whether the IT department is, as you put it, “isolated from the rest of the company.” Says Sara Gates, Wisegate’s CEO, “You’re right to be concerned about that. You should ask whether you’ll have a chance to work closely with people in other departments and whether IT is involved in developing company strategy, or is more of an afterthought.”

She notes that almost nine out of ten (88%) of seasoned IT managers say that it’s increasingly important for techies to develop “soft” skills like understanding strategy, negotiating, leadership, and building relationships, so that they have a voice in where the business is headed.

With that in mind, the managers in the poll suggested asking interviewers questions like these: “What kinds of opportunities will I have to develop ‘soft’ skills, along with technical skills?”; “What peers in other departments, outside of IT, will I regularly interact with?”; and “In what ways does the IT department here influence business strategy?” If it still seems as if IT is indeed isolated from everyone else, “go with your gut,” Gates says. “Don’t take the job.”

Three other findings from the Wisegate survey about picking the right employer for you:

Go big. Startups and small companies have cultivated a reputation for being hotbeds of opportunity for techies, so “it’s counterintuitive that the bigger a company is, the more seriously they take IT, and the more IT people take part in setting strategy,” Gates says. But the poll found that, in companies with 5,000 or more employees, IT managers said their role is taken “very seriously” virtually 100% of the time—versus just 23% of their peers in enterprises with fewer than 500 employees who said so.

Look for up-to-the-minute technology. IT job hunters should ask questions “that help you get an understanding of how aggressive, or how cautious, the company is in adopting new ideas,” Gates says.

The answer to a query like, “Can you tell me about something new that’s been adopted here recently, and what steps you needed to go through for that to happen?” can speak volumes, she adds: “The interviewer should be able to tell you quickly and clearly about specific projects, like moving something to the cloud or how they’ve dealt with BYOD. Hemming and hawing or ‘We just don’t have the budget right now…’ are definite red flags.”

Ask about longevity. The IT managers in the Wisegate poll felt strongly that “a critical part of career happiness is finding a good match between yourself and the culture of the company,” Gates says. One way to quickly find out how your IT peers find the work environment is to ask how long the typical techie has worked there. “Ask how many have just joined, and how many have been there for several years, so you get a sense of whether there’s high turnover,” she advises. The ideal is an IT department where many staffers have been with the company for six to 10 years—a sign, Gates says, that “talent is willing to stick around.”

That sounds like a lot of questions but, especially since your skills are in demand, there’s no reason to hold back. “Find a job that’s going to serve you well in the future,” says Gates. “A good fit is better for everybody, so be discerning.” Good luck.

Talkback: If you’re in IT, what questions would you ask a prospective employer? Why? Leave a comment below.